Word: verbal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...higher pitch: SAT averages for last June's crop of high school seniors made their largest combined gain since 1963. That was the year the scores began a decline lasting nearly two decades. Out of a possible 800, math results climbed by 3 points, to 471; verbal averages were up by 1, to 426. Says George Hanford, president of the College Entrance Examination Board, which sponsors the test: "We seem to have turned the corner in seeking to improve American education...
...dinner meeting of Italian-Americans in New York City at week's end, both Ferraro and O'Connor spoke. But guests expecting more verbal fireworks about abortion were disappointed. Neither challenged the other. They patted each other's hands and smiled fleetingly before parting. Yet the emotions stirred by the religious controversy seemed unlikely to subside during the remaining days of the presidential campaign...
...action does not infringe on free speech. Indeed, statements of disagreement are part and parcel of the open debate that freedom of speech is meant to encourage; the right to condemn a point of view is protected by the right to express it. Of course, I recognize that even verbal disapproval by persons in positions of authority may have inhibiting effects on students. Nevertheless, this possibility is not sufficient to outweigh he need for officials to speak out on matters of significance to the community--provided, of course, that they take no action to penalize the speech of others...
...byword for radicals and recalcitrance. The French-speaking province sends its own delegates abroad and calls its legislature the National Assembly. In 1970 a lunatic fringe agitating for Quebec's secession from Canada murdered a Cabinet minister, kidnaped a British diplomat, and set off so many explosions, both verbal and physical, that Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act, Canada's equivalent of martial law. Even today the nation's most eccentric voice of disaffection, the nonsensical Rhinoceros Party, is based and enjoys its greatest following in Montreal. Though the independence-minded Parti...
...case against interviews with writers is historic: they exploit personalities, expose their subjects in verbal undress, without their styles hitched up, and they traffic in anecdote and gossip. This is also the case in favor of such interviews. And why not? How else would a faithful reader learn- as he does in Writers at Work-that Elizabeth Bishop, while a student at Vassar, ate from a bedside pot of Roquefort cheese at night to stimulate dreams for her notebooks, and once spent a night in a tree outside her dormitory? Or know about Carson McCullers' visiting Elizabeth Bowen...